


Pillow Talk

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II
Genre: M/M, discussions of past rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-24 03:02:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1589297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hawke needles Fenris for details of his life in Tevinter. Fenris is not amused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pillow Talk

“Tell me something true.”

Fenris creases a pillow over his head. “Your sheets reek of mabari.”

Hawke laughs and tugs on his waist until he rolls back over. Then he shows him how to play the game.

“When I was eight years old, I used to get excited watching dogs tear rabbits apart,” says Hawke. “There was something so wrong about it, so raw. I wanted to be torn apart like that.”

And,

“The first boy I ever loved was an elf. I’ve probably had a fetish ever since.”

And later,

“The sky was terrible the day Carver died. Yellow, no wind. That’s what I regret most. That he had to die on a day like that. What good's dying if the weather's rotten?”

Fenris listens to the ugly with the elevated, the shameful with the embarrassing, all with their legs tangled together, and knows on some level what Hawke is trying to do.

Instead, Fenris ghosts a finger under Hawke’s softening erection, and neither of them is able to speak after that.

#

"A lover is someone you give secrets to," says Varric with a flick and flourish of his quill. "They see the cellars no one else does."

Fenris forces down another tankard of the Hanged Man's piss and belches under his breath. He considers how to elaborate the situation without pleading--that Hawke asks too much, that his questions prick like needles.

_“The Fog Warriors, were they all horned folk or something?”_

_“Was it humid in Tevinter?”_

_“Were there other slaves with lyrium pressed under their skin?”_

Hawke has always lacked tact, but three years ago he would never have dared such questions. Now he is desperate, starved. He wants to lick Fenris' heart and sniff his blood.

Fenris for the most part is able to deflect. It is a talent he acquired long before Kirkwall, and one he is not ready to relinquish. He answers vaguely, with innuendo, with dry remarks that make Hawke grin. Yesterday, while walking to Ander’s clinic through Darktown, Hawke asked him if he regretted what happened with his sister. Fenris shoved him against a wall in full view of Tomwise's stall and bit his lip until Hawke took the hint and slid his arms around him.

“But lovers tend to break their necks on the way down,” says Varric now, tapping the quill head so hard it spatters the bottom of his ledger with finality, before Fenris can even ask his question. "And Hawke's clumsy. A few locked doors never hurt a partnership."

Hawke, Fenris suspects, has waited his entire life for someone to waste his petty secrets on. Fenris has waited his entire life for someone to graciously ignore his.

#

“Hawke,” he sighs, exasperated, probed in more ways than one. "I do not wish to play this game anymore."

They have wasted an afternoon in bed again. The curtains are thrown back, and the sun roasts their legs beneath the duvet. Fenris massages his eyes and wishes words came better to him. How to explain that he doesn't want to live in the past anymore? That his life in Tevinter was like a house with no windows or doors where he was screaming to get out? Why Hawke wants to keep shoving him back inside- 

“It’s your life, Fenris,” Hawke says, desperately. “It’s who you are.”

"I am beginning to think you don’t know who I am," he snaps, pinching the bridge of his nose. The lyrium inside his skin burns like molten steel. "Spare me your petulance about whatever precious details you think you need to know."

Hurt, then anger flashes across Hawke’s face, and Fenris can tell the day has been spoiled. As Hawke rolls over to show him his back, Fenris reaches for him, then curls his hand. He knows Hawke is trying to carve a door in that old house of his past, is trying to wash out the evil, fecal smelling rooms with freezing air. He wants to know everything about Fenris, the same way Fenris craves to learn about him. He has unlocked all the latches in his heart, and now wants only the same in return.

What Hawke doesn’t understand that some rooms in men’s hearts aren’t meant to be opened, and that Fenris long ago threw away the key.

He threw it away because he wants to live now.

They sleep back to back. Tomorrow, they will go down to the Bone Pit to deal with dragons.

#

“Tell me something true.”

There is blood. Too much blood. It wets through Hawke’s boiled leather and into Fenris’s leggings, a growing warmth that makes him want to scream.

Instead he screams for the abomination whose lightning crackles in the dragon nest far below.

“Fen-”

“Don’t talk, fool.” Fenris’ gauntlets bite into Hawke’s arms hard enough to pierce flesh. The color has left his lips, and Fenris, trembling, unable to help himself, brushes a thumb across them.

“Please.” Hawke’s hand slides off his face. “Please….”

There is no time left. Fenris’ mind blanks. The memories dart around his grasping hands like fish in a stream, until he catches one at random.

“Danarius....used to let me stay in his bed,” says Fenris. “One night he was drunk, and gave me a silver pendant to wear. The next day he saw it and took it back. He punished me.”

The memory burns like acid in his throat, and he despises himself. He despises himself because it is true. He cannot tell if the ache inside him is a chain tightening or a chain breaking.

Hawke lets out a breath, and for a moment Fenris thinks they are both dead.

“Sorry I asked,” Hawke murmurs.

#

It takes him weeks to recover.

Fenris stays at Hawke's manor, reading, answering Hawke’s correspondence, walking the mabari. Bohdahn and Orana are so used to him they follow his instructions without question. It astonishes him how easily he plays the lord.

 _What is a slave but the shadow of the lord,_ he thinks bitterly.

Come evening, he rests with Hawke in bed while he heals, thumbing through a history he's read twice over while rain taps the roof. Hawke’s beard scratches his arm as he curls around him, head cradled against Fenris’ ribs.

“ _An Account of the Defeat at Ostagar?_ ” Hawke crinkles his nose. “You realize you have a first-hand account right here?”

“The author is modest,” says Fenris. “You are not.”

The words are stiff between them, and they both know why. Fenris tries to ignore the fact that the touch of skin on skin makes him tense in a way it hasn’t in years.

He lowers the book and sighs. It makes no sense. This man has been inside him hundreds of times, with fingers and tongue and cock, almost as many times as Fenris has been inside him. Hawke has stripped his armor piece by piece some nights with the reverence of a chantry priest until Fenris feels half a virgin, other nights ripped them off him as if they will both die if they don’t touch. Yet Fenris cannot remember a time he felt as naked as the day at the Bone Pit, when Hawke reached inside him to grasp something twisted and ugly—something not fit for light.

He feels diminished.

“It belongs to you,” Hawke murmurs at his side.

“I believe this one is yours,” says Fenris. Hawke has given him many books over the years, like they were trinkets and not precious heirlooms passed down through the Amell family line. “Not that I will turn down borrowing it again.”

“No, your memory.”

There is a long silence.

“I've been thinking about....a lot of things. I’m having a will drawn.” Hawke watches a bird dip a wet branch beyond the window. “This house, my estate. Everything should be yours.”

Fenris swallows. The pain in his chest makes his eyes sting.

“Hawke….”

“Gamlen can go suck an egg. If I die, I want all this to go to you.”

Fenris feels a rush of gratitude and shame, before they wash out of him.

“Kirkwall is not my home,” he says, irritated. _Not without you._ “What do you expect me to do with two mansions?”

“Take care of my dog, for one. I don’t trust Varric to remember to feed him and Isabela not to pawn him for a pint.”

Fenris sighs and spreads his fingers through Hawke’s oily hair. Secretly he is pleased by the gesture, but…

_A necklace snatched from his fingers, still warm from where he clutched it in his sleep like a child._

“When I was a slave,” he says, as evenly as he can. "There was nothing that belonged to me. My thoughts and desires were all wrapped up in what Danarius wanted for dinner, or when he might call me to his chamber.”

Hawke’s jaw tenses. Fenris has spoken of this before. It has taken a long time, but such generalities no longer bother him. It is in the specifics that his heart lurches.

“The pendant...was the first thing I ever owned.” _I loved him for giving it to me. I loved him like the stupid dog loves the boot that kicks it. I cried when he took it away._ “I still do not fully trust anything as mine. It is habit." _And unlikely to break._ Fenris is old enough to know that now. “I do not want property, Garrett. You needn't give me everything. What's important will persevere.”

Hawke is quiet for a long time. His eyes follow the bird as it flies off, spraying rain against the window.

“That the truth?” he says.

“Yes.”

Hawke drags a toenail up Fenris’s long, branded foot.

“Not even a few things?” he asks.

“Perhaps a few books, the cutlery set from the kitchen. And that velvet finery of yours.”

“But you’d take care of my dog, right?”

“Of course.” Fenris takes up the book again and licks a thumb to turn the page. “Emergency rations are always appreciated.”

Hawke bites his arm and Fenris laughs—the first true laugh in a long time.


End file.
